Stark Holborn is the author of the Factus Sequence the Triggernometry series and the groundbreaking digital serial, Nunslinger. Stark’s fiction has been nominated for the British Fantasy Awards, the BSFA Awards and the New Media Writing Prize. Stark also works as a games writer on TIGA-award winning games projects, and is currently lead writer on SF detective game, Shadows of Doubt and a contributing writer on cyberpunk slice of life sim, Nivalis.
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At first I thought the ship was just a figment. No one flew out here if they could help it, so far from Jumptown or the mine’s landing dock. But when I peered at the scuff’s locator the glitching screen confirmed my sighting, told me that what I was seeing was real: a ship falling from the sky. A ship running a scrambler to hide its name. Bandit, then, smuggler, outlaw, merc. Human, Pa always said, even if he still wore a black eye or blood-crusted lip from the last encounter. Always human.
The storms on Jaypea were bad that day, jostling the scuff as it buzzed a few feet above the ground. I gripped the handlebars hard to keep it steady, hands stinging as the toxic dust worked its way into my skin, into the blisters that rawed each palm, my quick pink flesh weeping the tears my eyes wouldn’t. Hadn’t had blisters like that for years. Not since I left the House, stopped digging Father’s twig garden. My gloves were gone, and I knew that soon the skin of my knuckles would be cracked and inflamed but still I hung on, rode on, until the call sign blinked and vanished.
If not for the winds, I would have heard the crash. As it was, I only saw it: a red bird burning on the dust, spewing smoke into the air. A small ship, a Merganser maybe, not meant for Gat-jumping, let alone a ditch dive from orbit. I stared up at the Gat, barely visible through the nickel clouds, the red lights of its vast ring structure gleaming dully, like beads of blood on a wound that never healed, a hole torn into the flesh of space. It looked like the ship had tried to veer away from the official lanes as if intending to pass us by and fly straight for the Dead Line. Only someone desperate would have risked it.
Had I known who – what – that ship held, I might have turned the scuff and ridden away. Might have sold everything on my body and maybe my body itself to buy passage to another place. Peeled myself away from history and sent it spinning off without me. But I didn’t know. I had no idea what was waiting.
Sometimes I think it was sheer luck, how we were thrown into each other’s paths. You would have said it wasn’t luck, that it was a road we had been on since the carbon that made us first collided and fused into being. Entangled roads we had already been walking for a thousand years before either of us were born.
All I know is that if I hadn’t gone to the Intercession House that day, none of it would have happened. I wouldn’t have been out, riding the bone-white wastes when I should have been behind my desk at the station with a cup of murk at my elbow. I wouldn’t have looked up and seen the smoke of your falling through the nickel snow that swirled constantly beneath the terraform. But I had. And so, in this world, I dismounted and walked towards your wreckage.
The heat of it kept me back, the creak and groan of hot metal and sizzling plastic. I walked around the dying bird, one step, two, three, the grit crunching beneath my boots, unable to do anything to put an end to its suffering. I saw blood, bubbling on the broken glass of the nav windows, dripping red into the white dirt. It led around the wreckage, a crimson trail, all the way to you.
I thought you were a war ghost. I’d never seen one during the day. They usually came at night, riding the wind, stumbling between worlds. But you looked so real, with the blood, and the footprints, stumbling away from me…
A heartbeat, a blink and the storm light changed, turning darker. I waited for you to vanish too, but you didn’t. So I took a step forwards.
You fell to your knees, like someone in grief or penitence. You see, I didn’t know you then. Where were you trying to walk to? There was nowhere to go. Your suit was torn, the dust drinking down the blood, the oxygen tank on your back half ripped away, but still, you tried to rise.
I took out my charge gun and levelled it, the blue fly of its sight landing on your back. I might have called a warning, can’t remember now, but you made no sign of having heard so I reached out my un-gloved hand to touch your shoulder.
You moved so fast it was a blur. All I knew was motion and pain, the gun tumbling from my grip before I could fire. An elbow drove into my face, cracking the plastic of my helmet, sending me sprawling backwards into the dust and I knew – without doubt – that I would die there, that nickel snow would fill my eyes and eat away my skin and no one would ever know what had happened.
A shape filled my vision through the spidering plastic: the barrel of a pistol, a hand caked in dust and blood, a silhouette against the blind sky.
I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps my fathers’ teachings were lodged in me deeper than I thought and I wanted to die free of the helmet, so my atoms would find god. But in the second before you pulled the trigger, I wrenched the visor of my helmet up and looked into your eyes.
I saw the face of a killer – a mask of gore, black hair like dried snakes, blood lodged in the deep grooves beside your nose and mouth, eyes like bullet holes punched in flesh that locked on mine and widened in shock.
‘“You,”’, you said, and fell.
— Fragment from The Testimony of Havemercy Grey
© Stark Holborn, 2024